I’m curious what plugins people like the most and find the most useful.
I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.
I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.
I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.
Mp3tag and hours of fixing metadata used to be me, and then I just kind of… Ran out of time for that.
When you say Plex interface remotely, are you referring to the Plex app or PlexAmp app? I feel like PlexAmp fixed all of my complaints about listening to music through Plex (the same app I use for videos).
I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.
I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.
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+1 for MP3Tag; it’s a wonderful tool and I’m overdue to donate to them.
I also use Plex to host the music but use PlexAmp for playback; the additional features (Sonic Adventure / “DJs”/etc.) are great features.
Here’s your reminder to send him a few bucks. https://www.mp3tag.de/en/donations.html
Thanks! (Seriously)
MP3Tag sounds cool, but there’s no Linux version it seems :(
Check out Picard, I switched to it when I switched to Linux: https://flathub.org/apps/org.musicbrainz.Picard
It’s a pretty simple program so it probably runs fine under Wine.
Easytag works pretty well for me on Linux, when I’m not just using Picard. I use EasyTag mostly for fixing and normalizing the tags on audiobooks these days.
I’m interested to see what others are doing here. All I do is update tags with MusicBrains before dropping them on my NAS for Plex & Jellyfin.
I have a library that’s been growing for about 20 years now. I don’t think I got too serious until around 2009, which is when I discovered music servers to host my library and quickly realized how bad its structure was. It took years of me getting folders done correctly followed by then working on tags. Automation scared me to much since the results were not always 100%. Once it was done I have kept a system to keep it that way the best I can.
So for me once I get new content I use the app tagscanner to edit everything to the way I like, then I drop them into music Picard were I found a tutorial online a few years ago to set it up to just edit music genres. I found the one thing I never got right was music genres so finding this tool was incredible. Took months to run large sections of the library though. Now I got every track labeled with up to 5 genre tags. Once that is done I change folder names to what I want, drop them into my music directory folder which is root > artist > album (don’t care about year since it’s tagged). Scan music into my musicbee app and if any are missing covers I right click and tell it to find them. Then do a scan with navidrome to add it all there.
Would you be willing to share scripts? Your situation is exactly my situation. Every time I decide to tackle it again, I’m overwhelmed with trying to settle. I dabble around as a dj and have so many duplicate tracks from various complications that automation has been problematic.
You don’t need to get too complicated with scripts if you let Picard do all the tagging and renaming. In my experience it works pretty well with the default out of the box configuration. Just don’t try to do your whole library at once, just go album by album and check each one is matching with the correct release. I was in the same boat about a decade ago and did the same, just a few albums a day getting tagged and renamed into a fresh music directory. And of course, make a backup first, just in case.
Lately I’ve been going through this process again because I messed up configuring Lidarr and many files got improperly renamed. Since they were all still properly tagged, fixing them has been easy, especially with Picard. I haven’t really bothered to find all the stray files yet (they’re still roughly in the right location) because Plex ignores the paths and just reads the tags so the misnamed files aren’t even noticable in Plex
